Hot on the heels of the super fun and challenging Doom project that pushed mappers to get inside the minds of revolutionaries in game design comes the natural sequel to Doom The Way id Did. Join us as we continue on the exciting journey to recreate retro-authentic mapping gold. This time there will be more map designer styles to emulate, more abstract warped-reality levels to explore, more monsters to thwart the player in new, devilish ways, and new mapping design concepts to rediscover and draw from as we meticulously strive to recreate the Doom II experience. If you're up for a different kind of mapping challenge and missed the first DTWiD project, try your hand at a map for Doom II The Way id Did.

ALERT!: The D2TWiD Final Beta has been updated to fix an egregious error! If you downloaded the beta before the time of this edit (10-02-13 at 04:54), you might want to do so again.

Maplist

BOLD = "Completed," pending inevitable tweaks. Maps that aren't emboldened are penned in for inclusion on the grounds of what's been seen so far (Map06 and 12, for example, are simply missing monsters), but all maps can still be trumped for quality.

Just like its predecessor, Doom II The Way id Did will be an attempt by members of the Doom community to recall the styles of Doom II’s chief level designers - Sandy Petersen, John Romero and American McGee - as well as the historical circumstances and limitations surrounding the development process in 1994, to commit to the formation of a 32 map Megawad which could convincingly stand in place of the existing commercial product.

The last project saw more than 30 authors and a hundred maps submitted for inclusion over roughly 14 months of bustling development; and that excludes those maps that failed to find their way to the project’s home page after being posted in the thread! This time around we want to beat it.
Just beat it.

Above is a link to the project's official website, providing contact details, information about the project, news updates, and the very maps themselves. You can vote and voice your opinion of the maps contained in the comments section featured, but those same maps can still be posted, praised, and battered with friendly critique right here in this thread.

Mapping Arrangement

With Doom The Way id Did, mappers were encouraged to create a map for the episode of their choosing in general rather than for a specific slot, as it was hoped that with this approach it would be easier to visualize a map being somewhere between the stock Doom maps - and thus compared alongside them - rather than in place of them, where one might inadvertently lend homage to the original map for that slot (a justified exception to this rule was when considering those slots that serve as the introduction/conclusion to an episode such as E1M1 and 8). However, this ultimately proved problematic when it came to selecting the final map list, as there arose the problem of too many maps having too little synergy and variation between each other when compared with the maps in Doom (this particularly when concerning size and pace of play). Although we like to think that we got there in the end, a slightly different approach this time around could help us avoid a similar problem!

The Approach

Decide whether you want your map to appear in an “episode” of Doom II (those sets of maps between intermission texts) or in one of the slots that either possess unique actions, serve as the start/end map of the game, or are secret levels (MAP01, MAP07, MAP30 and MAP31/32). If it’s the former...:

Keep in mind an ideal slot for your map, providing a little bit of leeway so that in the interest of progression the map might be shifted around a little bit.

Try to stay conscious about what sort of maps you would like to see either side of your own in order to create the most varied total playing experience. This could make it more favourable when measured up against other maps that for their size, pace of play and atmosphere also pair easily with maps around them. Be innovative in a way that only a designer from 1994 could be!

* McGee’s dominating the early proceedings ensures that certain facets of progression - particularly size and linearity - remain largely unchanged over a good 5 maps. As slight exceptions to these two, however, Map06 is notably larger than the 4 before it, and Map05 is less linear with the eastern portion of the map offering multiple routes for the player.

Unlike Doom, where each episode was dominated by one author or the other (with Tom Hall sort of dancing across the lot of it before he was kindly asked to step down from the floor), Doom II was a smorgasbord of hands with different owners building maps all over the shop. The displayed diversity of id designers isn’t really something that needs to be replicated down to the number, but it should go without saying that having 6 to 8 Shawn Green maps compared with a count of 10 in the style of Petersen is not the sort of scatter most desired, so keep that in mind when you’re contemplating which style to shoot for! Collaborations not seen in Doom II are perfectly fine (esselfortium and Xaser’s Filtration Compound for DTWiD E2M2 is a meeting of styles from Petersen and Romero), and could produce some very interesting and no less authentic maps indeed.

E1 should feature more maps in the style of one American McGee than by any other, as with his approach favouring a smaller size it is reasonable to conclude that the designers opted to have his contributions headlining the game, but a Petersen or Romero number in the early proceedings is not something to be frowned on.

Finally, if you want to shoot for a truly exotic brand of authenticity, try yanking out one your more successful DTWiD maps that didn’t make the cut and rework it into Doom II. Maps 8, 10, 18 and 19 in particular show evidence of having been started or made before many of the flats and textures exclusive to the game became available, and map 10 is a clear transplant of a map from when a certain Mr. Hall was still on the scene.

IRC

Doom II The Way id Did does not have a core team, per say. It is a community project that preserves the right for any and all members involved to discuss how best to achieve the goal of the project. There are however a few overly keen individuals that arrange and compile a bunch of stuff when it‘s needed and talk a lot in the mean time. They - as well as a few other regulars - can be found chatting away here:

irc.oftc.net
#doomtwid

All Doom, (almost) all the time. See you there!

Community Input

Here is where you can/will be able to find many of the links, articles and tips put forward by members of the community in aid of the project. A concise and fast-improving account by esselfortium is expected to be linked here very shortly indeed, so check back soon! It will aim to cover many of the important mapping traits that were adopted by id software’s designers circa 1994. You can’t go wrong by taking a peek. It’s Xaser approved! [citation needed]

Delayed The Way id Didn't! See doomworld.com/vb/post/1102215]this post here for more details. A reasonable expectation at this stage would be somewhere in the first or second quarter of 2013, but, given the nature of the submission method at the moment, this could fall back to something tantalizingly close, indeed.

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I wish I could attribute to this but I don't think I have gone far in my mapping skills ever since I started a month or less ago, even learning the guidelines for the project when they are available won't be enough either.

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Will there be Wolfenstein remakes in MAP31 and MAP32? Like, you know, in so many other megawads so far!

Making something like Monster Condo tempts me, but I don't know what editor to use (Doom Builder 2 is too detail friendly and it auto-aligns -- while nice, it's not helpful for deliberately undetailed maps). I also don't have time.